A blog by Kristen O'Meara

The Supernatural Washing Machine

Did you know that there is a washing machine out there that can actually supply drinking water? I didn’t think so either until I saw this advertisement in the Chicago Tribune:

“A Bosch washer could supply a lifetime of drinking water for 67 million people.”

This kind of advertising drives me nuts. It is more than a little insulting that the marketing people at Bosch think that American citizens consumers are too ignorant to know the difference between water supply and water consumption. A washing machine does not supply water. A washing machine uses water. What they could have said was, “A Bosch washer could save a lifetime of drinking water for 67 million people compared to less efficient models.”

Of course the ad was all in the context of touting the company’s environmental friendliness, and that is my larger point. Manufactured products are not generally “environmentally friendly.” Products that are efficient compared to other products are less environmentally damaging, but they still have an impact – they are still using nonrenewable resources, both in their manufacture and in their operation. Now that it is cool to be “green” I’ve noticed a lot of false and misleading advertising that basically wants the consumer to believe that their product is not just more efficient, but is in fact friendly to the environment. I like my washing machine as much as the next person, but I’m not going to fool myself into believing that dumping in a load of dirty laundry and a capful of detergent, and turning on a machine that uses hot water and electricity (and then dumps the used detergent and dirty water down the drain), is friendly to the environment. Even the energy star washers still work in the same way, even if they use a little less of everything.

Companies will naturally take any marketing angle and run with it, including jumping on the “green” bandwagon. But wild claims of machines actually being suppliers of natural resources? That’s low.